Displaying posts published in

October 2021

Anthony Fauci’s metaphysical get-out-of-jail-free card Roger Kimball

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/anthony-fauci-nih-congress-gain-function-jail/

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write.

Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing.

Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas. We’ve known for some time now that he was involved with, and paid with taxpayer money for, “gain of function” research at the Wuhan virology lab where the novel coronavirus that has caused such upheaval was developed.

Yes, that’s right. Fauci was paid by your tax dollars to help weaponize a virus that he then went on to exploit as a means to enhance his lugubrious celebrity.

He lied, under oath, about his role in his testimony before Congress, most pointedly in his heated exchanges with Senator Rand Paul this last summer.

Now we have Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, publicly challenging Fauci, charging that he is guilty of spreading “misinformation” about taxpayer funding of Fauci’s “gain of function” research at the Chinese virology laboratory.

Of course, “misinformation” in this case is just a polysyllabic synonym for lying — and besides wasn’t it Jen Psaki herself wanted people to be punished for spreading “misinformation”?

Yes, but she didn’t mean people like Fauci, who is on team A and is therefore exempt from public obloquy, not to mention federal prosecution.

The Ironies of the Rioting Youth of 2020  By: Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-ironies-of-the-rioting-youth-of-2020/

By August 2020, the protests, demonstrations, riots, looting, and arson that followed from the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd had spread to most of America’s cities. But the furor over Floyd’s death was not the only catalyst of the protests. The previously instituted national quarantine—roughly from March 20 through September—had emasculated the U.S. economy. 

Unemployment claims, in a prior economy of 3.5 percent near record low unemployment, now soared to 31,491,627 Americans out of work. The annual budget saw over $4 trillion in additional debt. Those who bore the greatest brunt were not coastal elites, but the recovering and once stagnant areas of the nation’s interior and inner cities. 

Forty percent of Americans making less than $40,000 were believed to have lost their jobs. But even the lockdown was not the only catalyst for the rioting. There were also more existential foundations of the hysteria. Many of those inner-city youth rioting and demonstrating, for all the political rhetoric, were suffering from a 21 percent unemployment rate during the quarantine, nearly three times higher than the rate of college graduates. Half those under 50 had lost their jobs, were furloughed or suffered pay cuts. 

Some of the urban single youth of all races, the foot soldiers of the more organized BLM and Antifa brigades—who were not mere opportunistic looters and rioters—were mired in tuition debt to acquire what were often nonmarketable degrees. They often added insult to injury by finding themselves nevertheless working in low-wage jobs. That paradox required the architects of Antifa and other purveyors of violence apparently to retreat to Marxist exegeses to explain their own lack of upward mobility and society’s culpability for not appreciating fully their woke genius and potentials. So veritable mass imprisonment within one’s homes, followed by an economic tsunami were the fuel for public rioting, should any spark, such as the killing of George Floyd, ignite the prior combustible fumes in our midst.